Electronic mail (“email”) has been a traditional means of electronic communication between/among people. Various types of documents (e.g., Microsoft Word, PDF, and JPEG) can be sent along with emails as attachments. A person can send an email to multiple recipients to deliver or share information. Typically, an email system requires an email server (or multiple email servers) to store, organize, and transfer emails from one user to another. Users send, receive, and view their emails via client-side applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, Apple Mail, or web-based email clients (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail). Although email is the most popular formal electronic communication means nowadays, it is neither suitable nor generally used for real-time electronic communications.
Instant messaging allows users to communicate with each other in real-time over wired or wireless networks. In the very beginning of the development of this technology, instant messaging only supported real-time text message exchanges. Today, more advanced instant messaging applications have added file transfer, clickable hyperlinks, Voice over IP, and/or video chat capabilities. Although it is less formal than email, instant messaging provides people a quick and easy way of communicating or sharing information. With the development of mobile technologies, instant messaging via mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) are becoming the mainstream means for communications or sharing information between/among people.
However, both email and instant messaging have their own shortcomings. For example, current email applications focus on the management of individual messages rather than focusing on the collaboration between/among users. As such, emails can be sorted or organized based on the time of arrival or by subject line, but it is difficult to present the messages in a way that the collaboration between/among users would appear clear and easy to follow. It is also difficult to manage documents or content attached to emails. Users need to download them to a local space first and then organize them manually.
Another drawback of email is that a user must have an email account to communicate with others. Email accounts, particularly those offered by free email services (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail) are the main targets of spam, ads, or even malicious security attacks. Furthermore, more and more people are go mobile nowadays. It is difficult for users to handle regular email tasks on mobile devices. It is even more difficult for users to juggle among multiple emails to piece together information sent separately on mobile devices.
On the other hand, instant messaging focuses on the collaboration between/among users rather than focusing on the management of individual messages. For example, current instant messaging applications lack the ability of organizing messages by topic or subject matter. Specifically, when users communicate with each other in an instant messaging application, all messages exchanged between/among them will be stored and displayed chronologically disregard the topic or subject matter they are related to. As such, users need to manually identify messages that are related to a particular topic or subject matter in order to share the relevant information with others.
Thus, there is a need for a new electronic communication system that can overcome the above shortcomings.